Protereisma directum, a fossil mayfly (285 million years old) from the Lower Permian Era of Oklahoma,microphotograph by Roy Beckemeyer (USA). Contemporary.

Millennia Insecta

I have known the eons-long longing of insects gone to stone, the empty wishes of disjointed plates no longer encasing throbbing thorax, fecund abdomen, the despondency of coxae that once cupped flexing femurs, the weariness of wings become limestone lithographs, the layered years hardened against weather: sturdy siltstone, kiln-baked mudstone that hold the compressed millennia of wisps of beings that whisked the air mere days, then died.

And I have seen a day pass from horizon to horizon in the instant I looked up from stone to sky, the split second I became aware of buzzing and flapping around me, the flicking wings, the whirring flags of chitin and scales, the jumping, hopping, stalking, searching, pulsating life arisen from these very foundations of their world.

Roy J. Beckemeyer

Roy J. Beckemeyer is a retired engineer and scientific journal editor who lives in Wichita, Kansas. He currently studies the Paleozoic insect fossils of Alabama, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and writes poetry. His poems have appeared in half a dozen anthologies as well as in many print and on-line literary journals. His first book of poetry, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, Lawrence, KS, 2014) was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He won the Beecher’s Magazine poetry contest in 2014, and the Kansas Voices poetry award in 2016. He recently co-edited (with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg) Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press, Pittsburg, KS, 2017).

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